Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Anton Polukhin Alekseevic
Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Anton Polukhin Alekseevic

Overview of this book

If you want to take advantage of the real power of Boost and C++ and avoid the confusion about which library to use in which situation, then this book is for you. Beginning with the basics of Boost C++, you will move on to learn how the Boost libraries simplify application development. You will learn to convert data such as string to numbers, numbers to string, numbers to numbers and more. Managing resources will become a piece of cake. You’ll see what kind of work can be done at compile time and what Boost containers can do. You will learn everything for the development of high quality fast and portable applications. Write a program once and then you can use it on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android operating systems. From manipulating images to graphs, directories, timers, files, networking – everyone will find an interesting topic. Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Introduction


In this chapter, we'll see some basic examples on how the Boost libraries can be used in compile-time checking, for tuning algorithms, and in other metaprogramming tasks.

Some readers may ask, "Why should we care about compile-time things?" That's because the released version of the program is compiled once and runs multiple times. The more we do at compile time, the less work remains for runtime, resulting in much faster and reliable programs. Runtime checks are executed only if a part of the code with the check is executed. Compile-time checks will prevent your program from compiling, ideally with a meaningful compiler error message.

This chapter is possibly one of the most important. Understanding Boost sources and other Boost-like libraries is impossible without it.